| The correlation with "infant mortality" is a subtle nod to prostitution, rape and abortion. Dead babies come from accidental or unwanted pregnancies, particularly when combined with drugs and alcohol. If the underground black market has a strong supply of prostitution (and not just human traffic sob stories, but also prostitution as party time and consenting my-vagina-my-choice power plays, aka: porn without the camera) and the johns are kept in line with strong arm tactics, you get a lot of ladies offering services, and a cross section of pregnancies that represent a poor business decision. Charting an uptick in dead babies and unattended children running around is a bellweather for women doing whatever, and having whatever done to them, in larger quantities. Really large quantities, over a sustained span of time looks more like big business producing unsavory norms, the kind associated with vice. In the periphery of legal pornography production there's a quantity of abortions that, in the early 20th century would have cropped up as "infanticide" and "infant mortality" for lack of better terms. Low literacy rate is a measure of the unwanted pregnancies that lived. Kids that have parents that don't care about them won't bother with compulsory education when they approach ten years old, and dealing with other students starts to become truly unpleasant. Individuals may obtain pragmatic reading skills, but creative writing and reading for fun would decline right along with an uptick in other adversities. |